Human Trafficking in the United States Research Paper

Human Trafficking in the United States - Research Paper Example While these impoverished people from South and Central America get into the United States in order to improve their economic wellbeing, evidence suggests that they barely get past acute poverty and only manage to survive. Despite being the richest nation on earth, a significant portion of its inhabitants lives below the poverty line. A large portion of them recently arrives illegal immigrants, who find disillusionment and further misery on their arrival into the country through illegal channels (Lybecker, 2008). This essay will argue that while human trafficking is not solely responsible for poverty in the United States, it does contribute to the growing pool of poor people and is a manifestation of the dark side of the global capitalist economy. Firstly, poverty and homelessness in the United States can be traced back a long way. Even long before political discourse about illegal immigration started, there has been a constant influx of impoverished and oppressed people into the country. As and when immigrants (legal or illegal) arrive into the confines of the country, they start out as homeless people by default. The direct and circumstantial evidence for this is available in literary and performing arts of the last one and half centuries. Prominent among the artists who dealt with this subject are Walt Whitman, Jack London, Charlie Chaplin, Woody Guthrie, John Dos Passos, Bill Mauldin, Jack Kerouac, and John Steinbeck. In the early twentieth century slang, homeless, vagabond immigrants were casually referred to as hoboes, which is a term of denigration. These so-called hoboes had a reputation for being barbaric, wild, lazy and unscrupulous. The first detailed representation of these people living on the fringes of society s tarted appearing after the end of the Civil War.